Repinly is a Pinterest directory which makes it easy to find interesting people to follow, and get insight into what the most popular pins, boards and topics are, and see what’s trending.

The site provides a ton of interesting stats, useful for the casual Pinterest user looking to gain a bigger following, as well as for brands looking for a little bit of insight on how to reach their target audience.

The most popular category on Pinterest happens to be Food & Drink, making up well over a quarter of the most popular pins, followed by DIY & Crafts, with Women’s Apparel making it into the third spot. The top categories don’t come as much of a surprise, considering the fact that Pinterest’s userbase weighs heavily on the female side, with some estimates, courtesy of comScore, putting it as high as 80%.

When it comes to the most popular boards, it’s interesting to find that the statistics change quite significantly. Almost one quarter of the boards belong to a variety of categories, with Home Decor appearing at the top of the list, as the first named category, making up 11% of Pinterest’s popular boards.

The site also gives us a bit of insight into the average Pinterest user. The average activity of popular ‘Pinners’ consists of over 2,600 pins, 33 boards, and they follow around 400 users.

It’s no surprise to find that the majority of time spent on Pinterest is spent pinning. The exact breakdown can be seen below:

While Pinterest does offer users a way to view the most popular pins, as well as drill down by category, Repinly takes this one step further. You can view the most popular pins by categories, and sort them either by the number of repins, likes, comments or by the date. You can view the most popular pins in the last 7 days, last 30 days, or the most popular pins of all time.

By being able to see the most popular pins of all time, marketeers can really get a sense of what kind of content is a hit on Pinterest, and has the potential to go viral.

In case you were wondering, the most popular pin of all time on Pinterest is a recipe for cheesy garlic bread, with over 91,000 pins and 12,000 likes.

When it comes to the most popular boards, you can sort the list either by the number of pins or followers. The most followed board has just 7 pins and over 3 million followers, but it also belongs to the most followed user on Pinterest, Jane Wang.

Repinly can also be useful on a personal level, since adding yourself to the directory gives you a Klout-like score for your account. Rami Madi, Repinly’s co-founder explains how the score is calculated:

“Once users add themselves to the directory, they get a score based on their number of followers, pins, and activity, which indicates their influence on Pinterest in comparison with other pinners.”

Explaining the inspiration behind creating Repinly, Madi said that he and his partners were looking for a way to measure the popularity of their own product pins. “When we couldn’t find this, we decided to build it,” Madi said.

Repinly isn’t the only service that has emerged, aiming to give Pinterest users a little more insight into their activity on the site. Pinerly, which we recently reviewed, gives users insight into the kind of traffic their Pinterest accounts are generating. By using sites like Pinerly and Repinly side-by-side, brands and power users can get a better sense of what kind of content works, and why.